Monday, December 21, 2009

Amelia in Paris

4 comments:

  1. Commenting finally on "Earhart...& Afghanistan": you are certainly right; she surely would have opposed the surge. The topic reminded me of a conundrum I've sometimes wondered about. That is, whether she would have flown with the Women AirForce Service Pilots in World War II. On the one hand, she'd said in 1935 she would sit out the next war in jail as a conscientious objecter. On the other hand, the WASP program was the first time in U.S. history that women pilots could participate in military aviation. It would seem to represent an opportunity to exercise exactly the sort of rights and responsibilities Amelia had argued for. (I'm out of room and will have to go to another post.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, she was certainly adamant about women having the right to serve, she argued for it vehemently. But I think that this had do with her idealistic notion of women as simply being more compassionate than men. Unfortunately it seems we're not . . . see Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi as leaders . . . I think she hoped that once women were forced to serve it would change the nature of war and put an end to it. It reminds me of my own idealism, and I wish I still believed it was true. But it seems that the older I get, the more gray areas I find, in my own behavior and in the behavior of others. It's one of the things I wonder as I write about her, what would she think of our world now? What sort of disappointment would she feel, and what sense of wonder?

    ReplyDelete
  3. In her article "Draft Women for War!" she denounced the common tendency of women to get caught up in the false patriotism and "romance" of war, and then push their sons and brothers out the door onto the battlefield -- which is hardly an act of compassion. But yes, she did hope war would be diminished by women's large-scale participation even if we're not always as compassionate as we'd like to think. I think she'd take a grim satisfaction in the fact that women are presently serving in all branches of the military and that women helicopter pilots flew combat in Iraq.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You may well be right, grim satisfaction seems a perfect way to describe it.

    ReplyDelete